Ian Betteridge / is on Nostr

Journalist, anecdontalist. I work for the company. But don't let that fool you, I'm really an okay guy. There is no future in England's dreaming.

Last Notes

2024-05-26 10:44:38

Someone should probably tell Rishi Sunak that if he seriously believes that young people are being radicalised, teaching them how to shoot modern weapons might not have the outcome he thinks it will.

2024-05-26 10:44:38

Someone should probably tell Rishi Sunak that if he seriously believes that young people are being radicalised, teaching them how to shoot modern weapons might not have the outcome he thinks it will.

2024-05-26 09:55:26

One of the delights of this time of year: the tiny fledglings working out that you can go into the peanut feeder and just grab food. The little floofball at the top hasn’t got it yet
https://cdn.masto.host/writing/media_attachments/files/112/506/786/647/350/559/original/fab6cb782a81e2a2.jpeg

2024-05-26 08:05:44

I would be much more supportive of compulsory national service for 50-60 year olds. The ones who got free education, affordable housing to buy, etc. It’s about time we gave something back to our country.

2024-05-26 08:05:44

2024-05-24 11:18:08

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I'm sure they will! This is going to be dissected deeply as soon as the code is out in the wild. And rightly so.

2024-05-24 11:12:31

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Lots of if's there. You need admin access to get to that file – there's videos around showing this – so the user would have to explicitly allow an app access to it. In that sense, it's more secure than most other files on your system.

2024-05-24 08:34:02

The funny thing about Microsoft's new Recall feature is how little actual "AI" it's doing. It's basically just making automatic screen captures, then running OCR and image recognition to create a semantic index you can search. Unless I'm missing something, there's no LLM (or small language model) used in it. Maybe in parsing queries?

2024-04-19 14:23:25

The only reason that companies stop reporting stuff like this is because the numbers look crap and they want to hide it.
https://variety.com/2024/tv/news/netflix-stop-reporting-subscriber-numbers-starting-2025-1235975341/

2024-04-02 06:15:13

It’s almost as if competition ends up giving customers better options than leaving it all to one company. Who knew???
https://mastodon.social/@stroughtonsmith/112179742390821842

2024-04-02 06:13:01

It’s almost as if opening up the iPhone encourages innovation, which benefits users over the long term. Who knew???
https://mastodon.social/@stroughtonsmith/112179679285930351

2024-03-23 13:28:30

MINOR SNARK ALERT! One of the most amusing parts of the Apple/DOJ and Apple/DMA cases has been seeing various Apple fans do a 180 turn. From crowing about how Apple was taking over 100% of all the profits in the entire global smartphone market to "poor little Apple has a tiny market share it's all so unfair" in the space of weeks.

2024-03-22 20:35:35

Hmm, I don't know who I should trust when trying to work out how strong the DOJ's case is – tech pundits or actual professors of antitrust law? It's so hard to decide.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/22/24109033/doj-apple-antitrust-lawsuit-legal-expert-praise

2024-03-22 09:17:27

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If you want to know more about the impact of antitrust on IBM behaviour, I’d recommend reading this paper by Tim Wu. In his conclusions, he looks at what antitrust regulators should learn from the case, and I found this paragraph quite relevant to what’s currently happening. https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3292&context=faculty_scholarship
https://cdn.masto.host/writing/media_attachments/files/112/138/586/688/157/966/original/1f73517501af7100.jpeg

2024-03-22 09:10:10

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And now antitrust law is being applied again in the way it has been for most of its existence, commentators and tech execs are finding it really hard to cope with the change. There’s an irony that Tim Cook appears to be affected deeply. After all, Cook started his career at IBM, and moved on to Compaq - a company that wouldn’t have existed without antitrust law. You would think he would get it.

2024-03-22 09:02:52

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Similarly, IBM could have bought Microsoft - Gates even offered them 10% of the business and they could easily have afforded more. In the environment of the past 20 years, where big companies are allowed to buy pretty much anyone, they would have. Back then antitrust concerns made it a nonstarter.

2024-03-22 08:57:29

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One simple example: why did IBM not buy DOS outright, a move which would have killed the PC compatible before birth and made IBM dominate for longer? Bill Gates would love everyone to think it’s because he was smart and IBM was not. In fact, it’s because IBM was wary of yet another antitrust suit. As Bill Lowe put it, “IBM didn’t want to be seen as dominating the market too thoroughly.”

2024-03-22 08:52:53

An entire generation of tech commentators and CEOs have grown up not understanding the history of antitrust in tech, or the impact it had in shaping the industry. And they really don’t understand that without regulatory action in the 1950s to 1980s, their own businesses would not exist.